The conventional wisdom says economic relief programs are for people in poverty — the truly desperate, the unemployed, the barely-surviving. Corey Womack earns a solid income, owns his home, and drives a truck with his company’s name on the side. He was the last person most people would picture calling a radio station to ask about government benefits. That call changed his financial year.
I first heard Corey’s voice on a Tuesday afternoon in late January 2026, during a segment on WPTF Raleigh’s afternoon drive program. The host was fielding questions about homeowner relief programs in North Carolina, and a caller identifying himself only as “Corey from Garner” described a situation that made me put down my coffee. He’d been dropped by his property insurer after filing a single hail damage claim. His new premium was nearly double his old one. And he was asking, quietly but with real urgency, whether any tax relief existed for people like him — not poor, not rich, just stuck.
I reached out to the station, got a callback number, and two weeks later I was sitting across from Corey Womack at a diner off New Bern Avenue, his work uniform still on, a mug of black coffee going cold between his hands.
A Decade of Doing It Alone
Corey Womack, 45, has worked in pest control for eighteen years. He runs a service route across Wake and Johnston counties, earns roughly $74,000 a year between his base pay and a small contractor bonus, and has owned his three-bedroom home in Garner since 2011. By most metrics, he looks like someone who has figured it out.
What those metrics don’t show is the decade he spent as a widower raising two children largely on his own. His wife, Denise, passed away from an aggressive form of lymphoma in the spring of 2016. His kids — now 22 and 24, both living out of state — were teenagers at the time. “I kept the house going, kept them in school, kept the lights on,” he told me. “But the savings? That got used up. Childcare through their high school years, a few years of paying for after-school programs while I worked — it adds up faster than you think.”
By the time both children had left for college and eventually jobs in other states, Corey’s emergency fund had been drawn down to nearly nothing. A few late credit card payments during a particularly tight stretch in 2019 and 2020 left marks on his credit report that still haven’t fully healed. His FICO score, which he described as hovering in the low-to-mid 600s as of early 2025, had limited his options more than once.
Corey told me he has a particular relationship with financial anxiety that he’s not proud of. “I don’t look at my bank account unless I have to,” he said with a flat laugh. “If I look, I stress. If I stress, I can’t sleep. If I can’t sleep, I can’t work well. So I just… don’t look.” It’s a coping mechanism that made a certain kind of sense to me when he described it, even as it clearly cost him over the years.
The Storm, the Claim, and the Letter That Followed
In August 2024, a severe hailstorm moved through the Garner area and left a trail of roof damage across several neighborhoods. Corey’s house took a direct hit. He filed a claim with his insurer — a company he’d been with for eleven years without a single prior claim — and the process seemed to go smoothly at first. The adjuster came out, assessed approximately $13,800 in roof damage, and the payout was processed within three weeks.
Then, in October 2024, a letter arrived.
“They weren’t renewing my policy,” Corey told me. “Eleven years, never missed a payment, never filed anything. One storm. One claim. Gone.” Under North Carolina law, insurers can decline to renew a homeowner’s policy for almost any reason, provided they give sufficient notice. The letter gave him sixty days.
After being turned down by three other standard-market insurers — each citing the recent claim and his credit score — Corey landed on the NC FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort for homeowners who can’t obtain coverage in the voluntary market. The plan provided the coverage he needed, but at $3,390 per year — nearly $1,543 more than he had been paying. That gap landed in his monthly budget like a stone.
The Radio Call and What He Was Actually Asking
Corey told me he almost didn’t call the radio station that Tuesday. “I was driving back from a job in Smithfield and it was on in the truck,” he said. “The host was taking calls about benefits, and I thought — I don’t know what I thought. I’m not the kind of person who calls radio shows. But I just picked up the phone.”
What Corey was really asking, he told me, was whether someone in his position — employed, homeowning, not in crisis in any dramatic sense — could actually qualify for any form of relief. He’d assumed the answer was no. “I figured it was all for people making thirty grand or less. I make decent money. I thought I didn’t qualify for anything.”
As I dug into his situation alongside him over several follow-up conversations, it became clear that Corey had, in fact, missed several years of legitimate tax credits — not because he’d done anything wrong, but because he’d assumed they weren’t for him.
The Credits He’d Been Overlooking
The most immediate discovery came from his 2024 tax return, which he was in the process of preparing when we first spoke. After the hail damage, Corey had made several upgrades beyond the basic roof replacement — he’d installed new attic insulation and upgraded to a more energy-efficient HVAC system, partly because the old system had been limping along anyway. Total out-of-pocket cost for those upgrades, above what insurance covered: approximately $4,200.
What he hadn’t known was that those upgrades likely qualified him for the IRS Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit — also known as the 25C credit — which allows homeowners to claim up to 30 percent of the cost of qualifying improvements, with an annual cap of $1,200 for most categories. According to IRS guidance on the 25C credit, qualifying upgrades can include insulation, air sealing, and certain HVAC systems that meet efficiency thresholds.
Corey’s attic insulation and HVAC work, when broken down by a tax preparer he finally visited in February 2026, generated a credit of approximately $1,260 on his 2024 federal return. It wasn’t a full offset of his new insurance costs, but it was real money he would otherwise have left on the table entirely.
Beyond the energy credit, the tax preparer also identified that Corey had been under-withholding slightly for two years and had missed a deduction related to a home office he uses part-time for his contractor scheduling work. The combined adjustments brought his total 2024 refund to $1,890 — compared to the $310 refund he received the year prior.
The Outcome Is Real, but Not a Clean Win
I want to be careful here about how I frame what happened to Corey, because his story doesn’t end with everything resolved. He is still in the NC FAIR Plan. He is still paying $1,543 more per year for homeowner’s insurance than he was two years ago. His credit score, while creeping upward, hasn’t recovered enough to make him attractive to standard-market insurers — a fact confirmed when he quietly shopped around again in January 2026 and received the same polite rejections as before.
The $1,890 refund helped. The energy credit was real and meaningful. But Corey was also clear-eyed with me about what had happened: he had simply been ignoring tools that existed for him, partly out of assumption and partly out of the avoidance habit that has followed him since Denise died.
He told me he put $1,200 of the refund into a savings account he hadn’t opened since 2020. The rest went to a plumbing repair that had been on the back burner for three months. “It wasn’t a windfall,” he said. “But it was the first time in a while I felt like I got something back.”
What Corey’s Story Actually Tells Us
When I left that diner off New Bern Avenue, I kept thinking about the assumption Corey carried for years — that relief programs were someone else’s territory. He’s not alone in that. According to IRS data, billions of dollars in refundable and non-refundable credits go unclaimed each year, often by working adults who simply don’t know they qualify or don’t seek professional help preparing their returns.
For Corey, the shift wasn’t dramatic. There was no single program that reversed his situation. His insurance premiums are still higher than he’d like. His credit score is still a work in progress. The decade he spent absorbing the financial blow of raising children alone on a single income left real marks that don’t erase quickly.
What changed, as best I could tell, was his relationship with the question itself. He called a radio station. He talked to a stranger — me — about money, which he said he hadn’t done since sitting across from a grief counselor in 2017, when the bills after Denise’s illness had finally become too much to manage silently. He made an appointment with a tax preparer instead of using the same software he’d been clicking through blindly for years.
That radio call, as small and hesitant as it was, turned out to be the most financially productive thing Corey Womack did in 2025. Not because the system suddenly became generous, but because he finally asked whether he was part of it.
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